My Program Is Mapping Our Courses to Our Student Learning Outcomes. One of Our Outcomes Does Not Seem to Show Up in Any of Our Courses. What Should We Do About This?

When you design courses in your program, have you considered using backward design?

"Deliberate and focused instructional design requires us as teachers and curriculum writers to make an important shift in our thinking about the nature of our job. The shift involves thinking a great deal, first, about the specific learnings sought, and the evidence of such learnings, before thinking about what we, as the teacher, will do or provide in teaching and learning activities. Though considerations about what to teach and how to teach it may dominate our thinking as a matter of habit, the challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow.

"Our lessons, units, and courses should be logically inferred from the results sought, not derived from the methods, books, and activities with which we are most comfortable. Curriculum should lay out the most effective ways of achieving specific results. It is analogous to travel planning. Our frameworks should provide a set of itineraries deliberately designed to meet cultural goals rather than a purposeless tour of all the major sites in a foreign country. In short, the best designs derive backward from the learnings sought." — Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design.

Your department may have recently spent a good deal of time thinking through its student learning outcomes. If they are valuable enough to include in your final list, then there is good reason to spend additional time thinking through the courses your department offers to see how each course helps students reach these outcomes.